Kay Ryan was appointed to the highest honor for a poet in this country as the Library of Congress’ sixteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry.  Her writing is often compared to that of Emily Dickinson because it illuminates the ordinary; “Her poems are compact, exhilarating, strange affairs…she is an anomaly in today’s literary culture – as intense and elliptical as Dickinson, as buoyant and rueful as Frost.”

Her work has been selected four times for The Best American Poetry and her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Yale Review, The Paris Review, and The American Scholar among other journals and anthologies.  She was named to the “It List” by Entertainment Weekly, and one of her poems has been permanently installed at New York’s Central Park Zoo. 

Of the many projects and responsibilities that come along with the title, she is a powerful advocate for community colleges.  Indeed, Ms. Ryan makes her living as a teacher, not of lofty creative poetical musings, but rather as a remedial reading professor at Marin County Community College, California, where she has resided since 1971. 

Taylor Mali

Performance Poet

April 6, 2010

Roper Performing Arts Theatre

7 pm

A former high-school teacher, Taylor Mali is one of the most well-known poets to have emerged from the poetry slam movement.  He is also one of the few people in the world to have no other job than that of “poet.”

He is the author of two books of poetry, The Last Time As We Are and What Learning Leaves and four CDs of spoken word.  Formerly president of Poetry Slam Incorporated, today Mali makes his living entirely as a spoken-word artist.

Mali is a vocal advocate of teachers and the nobility of the classroom and has a goal of creating 1,000 new teachers through poetry, persuasion and perseverance.

Nikki Giovanni is a world-renowned poet, writer, commentator, activist and educator.  One of the most widely-read American poets, she prides herself on being "a Black American, a daughter, a mother, a professor of English." Always insisting on presenting the truth as she sees it, she has maintained a prominent place as a strong voice of the Black community.

Many of Giovanni's books have received honors and awards.  Her autobiography, Gemini, was a finalist for the National Book Award; Love Poems, Blues: For All the Changes, and Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea were all honored with NAACP Image Awards. Blues: For All the Changes reached #4 on the Los Angeles Times Bestseller list, a rare achievement for a book of poems.

She has come to be called both a "National Treasure" and, most recently, one of Oprah Winfrey's twenty-five "Living Legends."  The author of some 30 books for both adults and children, Nikki Giovanni is a University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Charles Wright

April 7, 2010

7 pm -2057- Chesapeake Campus

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Wright creates verse that is a "strange alchemy.”  Wright's literary perseverance has resulted in what David Young described in Contemporary Poets as "one of the truly distinctive bodies of poetry created in the second half of the twentieth century."

Wright has been widely published, winning the National Book Award in 1983 for Country Music: Selected Early Poems and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1998 for Black Zodiac.

Through his numerous collections of poetry and particularly his "Appalachian Book of the Dead" sequence, Wright has consistently proved that he is, "among the best poets" of his generation. Yet Wright remains stoic about such achievements:  "One wants one's work to be paid attention to, but I hate personal attention. I just want everyone to read the poems. I want my poetry to get all the attention in the world, but I want to be the anonymous author."

In 1993, he received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for his lifetime achievement. He is a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and Souder Family Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.